Official blog for the Cygwin Ports project, which ports a wide variety of FOSS (especially X11 desktops) to the Cygwin platform.

Friday, December 2, 2011

A Qt hat, isn't it?

Fedora users may have noticed that F16 ships with Qt 4.8-RC. While I'm not sure what the rush was, it did cause an interesting problem when it came to the cygwin-qt cross-compiling package.

Building anything based on Qt requires more than just headers and libraries; Qt's object system requires code to be processed by moc, which generates additional C++ code for signal/slot handling and the like. There is also a number of other tools which "compile" various types of data into C++ code.
I had been relying on the native tools in qt-devel to do this, since the generated code is not arch-specific.

The problem here is that moc-generated code is very internal-specific; code generated with one version of Qt will not compile with headers from another version. Since the version of cygwin-qt needs to match that of the Cygwin (Ports) qt4 package, and I have no plans of updating that to 4.8 until its proven stable in conjunction with KDE, this created a bit of an impasse. There was another issue with relying on qt-devel, in that qmake requires patches to build libraries or plugins correctly on Cygwin, which limited cygwin-qt cross-compiling to CMake-based packages.

The solution to all this was to change the cygwin-qt-qmake package, which had previously just included qmake mkspecs, to provide native-built tools from the same version of Qt as cygwin-qt and with the necessary patches. While qmake/moc/rcc/uic are always statically linked with the necessary Qt code, the linguist, qdbus, and qt3support build tools are linked against the Qt libraries; for now, they are also statically linked with their Qt prerequisites.

The updated cygwin-qt and cygwin-qt-qmake are now available for Fedora 14 and up on both arches, along with an updated cygwin-filesystem to support these changes. Even better, thanks to a patched qmake, I was also able to add cygwin-qscintilla and cygwin-qwt packages.